SPOKANE, Washington (AP), Mar 13 _ The mysterious mewing in Vickie Mendenhall's home started about the time she bought a used couch for $27.

After days of searching for the source of the noise, she found a very hungry calico cat living in her sofa.

The Spokesman-Review reported that her boyfriend, Chris Lund, was watching TV on Tuesday night and felt something move inside the couch. He pulled it away from the wall, lifted it up and found the cat, which apparently had crawled through a small hole on the underside.

Mendenhall contacted the store where she bought the couch, but it had no information on who donated it. So she took the cat to the animal shelter where she works, so it could recover, and contacted media outlets in hopes of finding the owner.

Sure enough, Bob Killion of Spokane showed up to claim the cat on Thursday after an acquaintance alerted him to a TV story about it. Killion had donated a couch on Feb. 19, and his 9-year-old cat, Callie, disappeared at about the same time.